At the site of a plantation where abolitionist Frederick Douglass once lived, University of Maryland (UMD) archaeologists have uncovered striking evidence of how African and Christian religious beliefs blended and merged in the 19th century. The team dug up an intact set of objects that they interpret as religious symbols—traditional ones from Africa, but mixed with what they believe to be a Biblical image: a representation of Ezekiel's Wheel.
"No one has found this combination before. It may give us a snapshot of the blending of religious symbols of a tenant farmer after 1865," says University of Maryland archaeologist Mark P. Leone, who led the team. "Christianity had not erased traditional African spirit practices; it had merged with them to form a potent blend that still thrives today."
From the late 18th century, Methodist Episcopal, and later African Methodist Episcopal (AME) preachers successfully ranged Maryland's Eastern Shore carrying the Christian message, Leone explains. They converted African Americans to Christianity, in part, by giving new meaning to traditional symbols. A powerful West Central African spiritual symbol—the cosmogram, a circle with an X inside—may have fused with Ezekiel's blazing chariot wheel. Uniquely, the discovered array contains both.
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http://phys.org/news/2016-11-archaeologists-ezekiel-wheel-african-americans.html#jCp
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